Even Though I'm a Chick from the Bronx, I Adore Whit Stillman's Metropolitan

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Metropolitan, the gold standard of reissue distributors, Rialto Pictures, is re-releasing the movie. It will premiere on August 7th at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York City, and a week later in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal. There will be a national roll out in late summer/early fall.

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Long before Gossip Girl, there was Metropolitan. I have a lot of nostalgia for this indie classic that centers on a group of young New Yorkers, aka "urban haute bourgeoisie," on winter break from college during the dazzling debutante ball season.

I got home and announced to my family that when I grew up I was going to have a doorman.

The film not only introduced me to the work of Whit Stillman, which I still admire, my favorite of his oeuvre being Last Days Of Disco, but also helped me get over my regret that I grew up in the outer boroughs instead of the more glamorous New York City proper.

I came of age in the debutante-free Bronx, but in fourth grade, my mother brought me "downtown," as we called it, to see the Radio City Christmas Show. I got home and announced to my family that when I grew up I was going to live from whence I'd just come, and have a doorman, no less. Some laughed, some rolled their eyes. They now visit me on the Upper East Side, where I have my door opened daily by Jimmy, Roddy, Jason, Joseph or Nelvin.

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But, at least back in 1990, I was still fascinated by an upbringing that shoulda, coulda, woulda been. Minutes into Metropolitan, I connected with Tom Townsend,the film's middle-class collegian and lone Upper West Sider, who, like me, came from a single-parent home. FYI: Most people I knew didn't even have a Sweet Sixteen, let alone a coming out party. I remember reading with amazement back in 1982 how Deb of The Year, Cornelia Guest, was out partying every night, while I was working late at my entry-level ad agency job.

By the time I left the theater, though, I realized that I had more in common with the movie's female protagonist, Park Avenue socialite Sally Fowler, than I'd thought. Things weren't as different for upper echelon Gotham kids as for their Bronx counterparts. Like us, they just wanted, as Roger Ebert said, "to be accepted, admired and loved."

Although my family's railroad apartment didn't compare to Sally's palatial duplex, and my friends and I didn't attend gatherings at The Plaza Hotel, daily interactions of the debs and their preppie escorts were exactly the same as ones I participated in.

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They basically hung around each other's homes, where the boys showed off eruditions they didn't have, played games like Truth or Dare, and smoked cigarettes.

Not only that, but they gossiped about one another, minded each other's business, and found themselves in tears because they weren't interested in the boys who liked them, and the boys they were interested in liked someone else. When Tom dumped Audrey for Serena at one of the fêtes, I flashed back to a dance where my own guy named Tom couldn't get rid of me fast enough, so he could chat up a girl named Nancy. I finally saw that romantic misadventures happened whether you were a Manhattan sophisticate in an evening gown or a neighborhood girl in a hoodie.

Another thing that helped me relate so much was that, even though I knew the film was scripted, (based on real people Stillman knew), it had a documentary vibe, mainly because the cast was made up of then-unknown actors: Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, Allison Rutledge-Parisi, Dylan Hundley, Isabel Gillies, Bryan Leder, Will Kempe and Elizabeth Thompson.

Like a Woody Allen movie, Metropolitan also shows Manhattan in all its cinematic glory; besides The Plaza, there's the 21 Club, and the stately Scribner bookstore on Fifth Avenue as well as the gleaming Automat, now both defunct.

It's still hard for me to believe the writer/director/producer had such a hard time selling the film, but Stillman eventually did find interest, and positive reviews from many esteemed movie critics got the ball rolling all the way to an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a win as Best New Director from the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and another win at the Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature, to name a few.

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I may not have been born a "Sally," but I have evolved into an adult one, who adores her city and likes when it is portrayed in a good light. Now that I'm familiar with a world that summers in the Hamptons, dines at Sant Ambroeus, and shops at Barbour, I like that the re-release of Metropolitan offers a realistic and rather low key portrayal of young, upper class NYC; one that I hope will wipe the caricatural Gossip Girl off the books.

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